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He had vowed to be brief, to confine his remarks to seven or eight minutes during Sunday's induction ceremony for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

"Short and sweet," he had promised, and that goal would gain urgency from the pressure building in his bladder after nearly three hours of speeches and video tributes.

Yet the University of Louisville's basketball coach has not won 664 college games and two NCAA titles by being enslaved by a script. He is quick to incorporate new information, to adjust to shifting circumstances and he continues to tinker as long as time permits.

If the 20-minute speech Pitino delivered Sunday afternoon was more than twice as long as he had anticipated, it was also indicative of his ability to improvise on the fly. From a stranger's statement that his induction was overdue, Pitino found a launching point to express his humility about being included in the Hall of Fame. Reunited Saturday with men who played for him more than 30 years ago at Boston University, Pitino picked up a fresh anecdote he used to frame his career reminiscences.

"Back then there was no 20-hour rule," Pitino said, referencing the NCAA restriction designed to limit the amount of supervised activity required of athletes. "I thought that was the worst rule that the NCAA could ever put in until last night.

"I was coaching these guys an hour before breakfast, an hour between classtime, a three-hour practice and, being so young, I would always seek them out in the evenings for some two-on-two or -three-on-three basketball at the end. They were joking last night that it was 20 hours - a day. A couple of my guys said, 'You know what you're nickname was, coach? 'Pop.' "

Initially, Pitino interpreted the nickname as a sign of respect, only to learn it was instead a subversive acronym: "Prisoners Of Pitino."

Besides the advantage of being both funny and self-deprecating, the story fit Pitino's larger theme: that a coach achieves Hall of Fame status on the shoulders of his players. While this hardly qualifies as a revelation, Pitino has repeated the sentiment so much in recent months that it has started to sound like the core of a politician's stump speech, slightly tweaked for the sensibilities of different audiences.

He has a knack, though, of making it seem spontaneous, of weaving unforeseen developments into a cohesive narrative. Pitino had not expected to speak last Sunday - previous Hall of Fame functions had proceeded alphabetically - but he found fresh material in the comical remarks of Oscar Schmidt, the brilliant Brazilian scorer, and in the arrival of Schmidt's Hall of Fame presenter, Larry Bird.

During his troubled tenure with the Boston Celtics, Pitino's defining statement was a defiant reminder to frustrated fans that, "Larry Bird isn't walking through that door. . . Kevin McHale is not walking through that door, and Robert Parrish is not walking through that door. And if you expect them to walk through that door, they're going to be gray and old."

Sunday, Bird's appearance prompted Pitino to inquire, "What took you so long to walk through that door?"

"You don't want me now,'" Bird replied.

Speaking extemporaneously has its perils. At one point in Sunday's speech, Pitino said Louisville was his next stop after the University of Kentucky - an unthinkable move had it been made directly -- omitting for the moment his Boston experience. He repeatedly compared Kentucky to Camelot, and claimed to have never had a bad day on the job at UK.

"I learned all about pressure," he said. "Every single day there was unbelievable pressure to perform and it was very difficult and that pressure brought out the best in everybody. It forces you to rise early, stay up late, work as hard as you can possibly work."

That pressure persists. Though Louisville Athletic Director Tom Jurich said Pitino has "earned monumental things for our university and our community," the 60-year-old coach is not ready to bask in his own glory. He left Symphony Hall Sunday evening with one more function to attend and a plane to catch.